Archer takes a clever premise--a group of stepdaughters who plot revenge on their evil stepmothers--and develops a funny, often poignant first novel. In alternating first-person chapters, the author introduces the 15-year-olds who, either due to the machinations of or repulsion by their new stepmothers, all wind up at the same Massachusetts boarding school. After Alice Bingley-Beckerman's famous novelist mother dies, her famous novelist-turned-playwright father is snagged by R. Klausenhook, Tony-winning diva with no room for a teen in her one-bedroom, Upper West Side apartment. Reena Paruchuri's one-time participation in a Beverly Hills yoga class forges the connection between her 53-year-old India-born heart surgeon father and the home-wrecking blonde, blue-eyed 25-year-old yoga instructor. Scholarship student Molly Miller (whose favorite book is the Oxford English Dictionary) sees the nearby boarding school as her ticket out of a household now run by a former prom queen. The false first-impressions the three teens form of one another fall away as they discover what they share in common and form the Poison Apples club. What sets the book apart from many in the boarding school genre is the underlying compassion these three retain, despite their new and uncertain circumstances. The adults here remain two-dimensional (why don't the fathers stand up for their girls?), but perhaps that's in the eyes of the beholders, too. As each teen sets out on her path to pay back her hateful stepmother, she reveals a maturity greater than the adults around her. Readers will hope for more from this likable trio--and this talented storyteller.--Jennifer M. Brown
